How To Get Too Much Done - Introduction Draft 1

The best tip about self development, and the one that I am most convinced is true is the simplest. Don't try to do too much.
There is almost on solution to overcommittment, and no real benefit either.  Even if you somehow manage to get two projects completed in the time that was really needed to achieve one, all that means is that you have halved the satisfaction to be derived from both of them.  But it worse than that.  There is a famous principle called the 80:20 rule.  80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts.  There is no real mathematical precision here, but it is certainly true that at any one time you can only appreciate a small number of successes.  So even without any way of quantifying either effort or effectiveness, we all know that we are trying to do too much if we divide our efforts and resources.

This was brought home to me very directly at one point in my career.  I moved from a company which had the clear rule that a team had three big projects and a minor one.  The minor one was supposed to be there to fill time when for any reason all three of the major products had no productive activities available to them.   You couldn't start a new project unless you either completed one you were working on, or it was cancelled.  I then moved on to a more entrepreneurial company where the owner and founder would simply add projects to the list whenever he thought of them.  Within a few months of starting I was overwhelmed with trying to do too many things at once.   My productivity started to plummet and before long rather than waking up eager to get to work and get on with the stuff that I really enjoyed doing I was simply going through the motions.  I felt my effectiveness steadily draining away and my interest vanishing even more quickly.

So this was a very salutory experience.  As always, it sounds simpler written down than it was to actually go through it.  But looking back with the clarity that time brings I can see that there really was just one problem.

I am writing a book on time management for the overcommitted.  My qualification for this is that I am overcommitted.  As part of the exercise I am recording how long it takes me to write the book.  I am using blog posts like this one to document it as evidence of just how long things like this actually take.